Are you a slave to the scroll?

When you wake up in the morning, before you’ve even wiped the sleep out of your eyes, do you reach for your phone and start scrolling through your social media profiles?

Whenever you’re waiting for someone or something, do you decide to quickly check in on every social media account you have, to ‘catch-up’? Then cycle through them all again to make sure you didn’t miss anything while checking on the other ones?

What about a Snapchat scroll? Or Insta-stories? Before you know it, has half-an-hour flashed by, and all you have to show for it are red-eyes and an in-depth knowledge of what your favourite ‘grammers have had for brunch?

IT’S TIME TO STEP AWAY FROM THE SCROLL, MY FRIEND.

Mindless scrolling on social media literally saps the life out of you.

Notice your lack of focus and the negative narrative that creeps in when you’re aimlessly scrolling through that sea of content.

If your internal monologue starts to throw shade with little digs like ‘your life is sh*t compared to theirs’ and ‘you’re useless’ then you need to seriously stop the scroll.

It’s about being in control of your phone, not letting the phone control YOU.

Here’s the how-to:

Delete the Facebook and Twitter apps from your phone, and allow yourself minimal desktop usage once or twice a day, not checking-every-five-minutes-just-in-case.

​Turn off social media app notifications on your phone – all of them! They stop you in your tracks, suck you in and before you know it, five hours have passed and you’ve scrolled to the BOTTOM OF THE INTERNETS.

Schedule stuff. Not everything – I mean, I get that social media’s all about capturing those ‘spontaneous'(ish) IRL moments BUT using tools like Buffer or Hopper to put a skeleton structure in place for more ‘marketing-led’ messages (promoting blog posts or posting a daily Insta pic at a set time), particularly in the mornings, carves you out some solid time to focus on other offline things.

Log out of all your profiles so that every time you feel the urge to scroll, you have the extra hassle of logging on, and who cba with that.

Switch off your notifications so you’re not suckered in every time you get an alert.

Make your bedroom a social media free zone. This is tricky, ‘cos we all love a Sunday morning scroll, but being on screen just before going to sleep or as soon as you wake up ain’t good for your head and ruins your sleeping patterns.